This week our advisory board member Chris O’Hara published a column in AdExchanger that gives a good overview about how social affinity facilitates a more complete understanding of your consumers. Here’s the link to his post:

Social Affinity Data: The Key To The Fabled ‘360 Degree View’

As Chris makes clear in his column, social affinity data on its own can create penetrating new insights into your audience. But it gets even stronger — and creates that holistic 360-degree view — when it’s integrated with other data sets such as ratings, purchase history, and social listening, as in this diagram:

Social affinity data chart Our 360-Degree View of Affinity Data

Understanding Your Audience through Social Affinity

This has been Affinity Answers’ bread and butter for a long time now, to the point that we see the world this way automatically. From working with our clients, we know that the 360-degree view grounded in social affinity data produces better results for entertainment marketers, ad sales pros, and others. But as we have new conversations with entertainment and media companies, we realize that a lot of people don’t realize that such a comprehensive integrated view of the data is even possible.

That’s why Chris’s column is so important. As he puts it:

I believe that understanding social affinity data is the missing piece of the “360 degree view” puzzle. Adding this powerful data to online viewing, buying, and social listening data can open up new ways to understand consumer behavior. Ultimately, this type of data can be used to generate results (and measure them) in online branding campaigns that have thus far been elusive.

Want a full view of the people who are predisposed to love your brand? Understand what you both mutually care about through social affinities — and measure it.

Please take a few minutes to read the AdExchanger piece, and then tell us: How could you put this comprehensive data view to use?